Charter Customers Say Bigger Isn’t Likely to Mean Better

Terence Allen, a longtime Charter Communications customer, said he was disappointed with frequent service interruptions.CreditCreditKevin Liles for The New York Times

By Hilary Stout

May 27, 2015

“Maybe it will go from an F-minus to an F.”

So predicted Terence Allen of Atlanta, a longtime Charter Communications subscriber, upon hearing that many long-suffering Time Warner Cable customers were crossing their fingers that Charter’s acquisition of their cable provider could lead to better service.

Mr. Allen, who has had no cable option but Charter in his neighborhood for the last 15 years, was echoing (in rather more pronounced terms) a sentiment voiced by a number of analysts, consumer advocates and brand watchers: For Time Warner Cable subscribers, “not quite as bad” may be about as good as they can expect with this deal.

But for customers frustrated with frozen screens, unresponsive remote controls, uneven speeds, slurring and skipping over dialogue, and the elusive quest to get a real person on the phone when there is a problem, the effect may be negligible.

“Charter is not going to revolutionize Time Warner’s service quality, because Charter’s service quality is not that much better,” said Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America.

Video

Thomas M. Rutledge, Charter’s chief executive, says that the deal is very different from Comcast’s bid for Time Warner Cable and the cable powerhouse will still be relatively small.Published OnMay 26, 2015CreditCreditCNBC

Not everyone was gloomy. Amy Yong, an analyst at Macquarie Capital, predicted that Time Warner Cable customers would find more pricing transparency and faster Internet service with Charter. She said that Charter had a better search-and-discover function for its video offerings.

“From a consumer standpoint, I know there is a general belief that all the cable companies are the same,” she said. “But there are pretty big nuances among the players.”

The effect on prices would vary according to the market, Ms. Yong said. And the cable companies’ customer markets have little overlap, meaning that there would not be added competition that could drive down the expensive cost of subscriptions or premium packages in a particular city. But for current Time Warner Cable subscribers, she said, “I think the experience will be better and the value proposition will be better.”

Adding Time Warner Cable’s 15 million customers to Charter’s nearly six million, as well as the 2.5 million that Charter is acquiring from Bright House Networks in another deal, would give it just three million fewer than Comcast, a size that could pose service issues because of the adjustments to a larger operation.

Consumers’ disillusionment with cable companies has already helped fuel cord-cutting, or moving away from cable packages toward Internet-based streaming services like Netflix and newcomers like HBO Now. (Still, those services depend on fast Internet connections provided in many cases by the same cable companies.)

If Charter is supposed to have faster Internet, Mr. Allen is not seeing it.

His speed was “supposed to be on the higher end,” he said, “but their high end doesn’t seem to be very high-end.”

Then there is the problem of the Internet and cable going out entirely, often as a result of bad weather, he said. That has happened eight to 10 times over the past two or three years, he said, and when it does, rather than getting a live person on the phone to arrange a repair, he gets sucked into a spiral of computer voice recognition software commanding him to try to disconnect this or restart that.

“I would say my impression over all of Charter is that they talk very well about their services and their breadth and depth, but quite honestly they don’t deliver very well,” Mr. Allen said. “One of the things they push quite a bit is the bundle — telephone, Internet and cable. I would never even consider getting the telephone because their cable and Internet can be so dodgy.”

“Charter takes our customer service very seriously,” said a spokesman for the company, noting that Charter has hired 7,000 customer service workers since 2012, including converting all the workers at its customer call centers to staff employees and bringing the centers back to the United States from overseas.

“There are millions of Charter customers who are satisfied with our products,” said the spokesman, Alex Dudley.

“We can always do better,” he said. “It is our job to make sure that customers like Mr. Allen don’t exist.”

The Better Business Bureau in St. Louis, the city where the company used to have its headquarters, lists 5,183 closed complaints about Charter over the last three years, 2,961 of them for “problems with product/service” and 1,762 for “billing/collection issues.” Of the customer reviews posted on the bureau’s website, three are positive and 51 are negative. One is neutral.

Still, Charter may be improving. The YouGov BrandIndex surveys 4,300 consumers from a pool of two million every day to track brands in a number of industries, including cable. Charter comes in third lowest in customer satisfaction — only Comcast and Time Warner score worse — but slightly more customers recently began giving the company positive rather than negative ratings, said Ted Marzilli, the chief executive of YouGov BrandIndex.

Over the last 14 weeks, he said, Charter has had a score of 1.4 percent, meaning that 1.4 percent more people have rated the company’s customer satisfaction positively than have scored it negatively. That is better than both Comcast (negative 9) and Time Warner (negative 10) during that same period. Charter was in negative territory throughout 2014, he said, but nudged into positive territory this year.

Whether that difference can translate into marked change for consumers is unclear, Mr. Marzilli said. “It is just a question of who is ultimately going to prevail and how quickly can you change the mind-set and implement change across the organization to the extent the consumers start to notice,” he said.

Lauren McCawley, a 14-year Charter subscriber in Malibu, Calif., says she has lots of friends in Los Angeles with Time Warner Cable and hears them “constantly complaining” about it. “So knowing that Charter may acquire Time Warner makes me nervous.”

Still, she noted, her own cable had been out for the last three days.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hoping for ‘Not Quite as Bad’ Cable Service . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe